The Book of Tides

The slack-tide is the worst, curled on my side I cup a conch to one ear, as if, I may hear a cough of men washing up on the shore. Angela Readmans The Book of Tides is treasure trove of luscious, visceral poems that are delightfully risky, utterly thrilling and always close to the bone. Readmans poetry teems with the rare and beautiful, the dark seaweed sparkle of a particular strand of skewed folklore; here we encounter fishermen and mermaids, a man with a beard of bees, a Tattooists daughter, Joan of Arc, and Beatrix Potters bed a rich swell of voices with an irresistible and peculiar power. Salt-speckled and sea tinged, these poems possess a distinctive eye for disconcerting and uncanny details from notes in bottles and knotted handkerchiefs to sequin fish-scales and drowned rats. To read Readmans poetry is to be simultaneously unsettled and enraptured, and to encounter witchcraft, murder, love and loss. As The Book of Tides unfolds, will you dare to put your ear to its seashell and tune into its siren song, cast yourself adrift on a its strange and alluring current?